Japanese officials and international nuclear experts have generally said the levels away from the plant are not dangerous for humans, who anyway face comparable radiation doses on a daily basis from natural substances, X-rays or plane flights.

This may be true - but what it means, upon thought, is that this 'safe level' of radiation is in addition to what is received on a daily basis. Do two 'safes = one unsafe?

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"It is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they are confirmed by theory." -- Arthur Stanley Eddington

Yeah -- none of it is "safe." It is "low risk," which is a statistical term that doesn't mean the risk is low. It has meaning only in context of numbers or frequency. Low risk actually means that a lot of people will get sick and a significant number will die. Ask your dentist.

I think I read somewhere that background radiation itself might cause cancer in some cases; but that not everyone who gets a higher dose of radiation will develop cancer either.

And there are different kinds of radiation that last different lengths of time: like the iodine one dissipates in a few days, I think, so the Canadians and Americans who are buying up iodine pills are wasting their money.

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Economics is a human creation, borders are human creations and nature doesn’t give a damn about these things. - David Suzuki

I know someone who just bought a hyperbaric chamber to help counter radiation levels in her kids (she bought it for other reasons as well, but the Japan disaster was her tipping point - or her selling point, since I assume she will be encouraging other people to come and use it for $$). My view is that radiation causes cancer, yes, and that plus increased longevity will mean that more people will get cancer. Which ones and where, remain to be seen. The reports from Chernobyl state that anywhere between 10K and 50K people (or more?) died as a result of radiation.

As Donald Rumsfeld would say, there are the known knowns, and then ... never mind. The thing is, there are a lot of variables. People are differently susceptible, although we don't usually know who is until they get sick, and I think beyond a certain level anyone will be killed -- the heroes who actually grasp [something radioactive?} to stop an explosion die within days, I believe. (Someone did that at Los Alamos -- I forget what it was that he grasped.)

I'm sure the rape-a-scans at airports are not safe. The obvious difference between them and medical uses is that there are good reasons to get X-rays, and people submit to them with informed consent. At airports people are bullied into something unnecessary (unless you consider enriching Michael Chertoff to be necessary). I don't know why there isn't more resistance.

Modern sea walls failed to protect coastal towns from Japan's destructive tsunami last month. But in the hamlet of Aneyoshi, a single centuries-old tablet saved the day. "High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants," the stone slab reads. "Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point."

It was advice the dozen or so households of Aneyoshi heeded, and their homes emerged unscathed from a disaster that flattened low-lying communities elsewhere and killed thousands along Japan's northeastern shore.

Hundreds of such markers dot the coastline, some more than 600 years old. Collectively they form a crude warning system for Japan, whose long coasts along major fault lines have made it a repeated target of earthquakes and tsunamis over the centuries.

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It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity. It is when we all play safe that fatality will lead us to our doom. It is in the "dark shade of courage" alone that the spell can be broken.-- Dag Hammarskjöld